With new funding formula, some community colleges are getting bigger piece of pie

Friday

Feb 28, 2014 at 6:14 PMFeb 28, 2014 at 8:45 PM

Gerry Tuoti Wicked Local Newsbank Editor

With discussions on the state’s fiscal 2015 budget underway, some community colleges are getting a bigger slice of the pie as Massachusetts implements a new funding formula.

“We are trying to link budget allocations to our educational priorities,” state Commissioner of Higher Education Richard Freeland said. “That’s really an important principle of budgeting.”

Enrollment and performance trends are reflected in the funding. Two of the fastest-growing community colleges, Quinsigamond and Bristol Community College, got funding increases of 25.8 and 21.2 percent, respectively, for the current fiscal year. Much smaller institutions got smaller allocations. Cape Cod Community College, for example, got a 3.5 percent increase in fiscal 2014.

The formula

The new funding formula, which was first introduced for the current fiscal year, splits $20 million in funding among the 15 Massachusetts community colleges based on enrollment and performance data, including graduation and retention rates. That is in addition to base funding. The system, Freeland said, works to correct funding inequities generated by the previous funding formula. The old formula provided incremental, across-the-board percentage increases or reductions, regardless of each college’s size or performance.

The formula, Freeland said, appropriates a $4.5 million operations subsidy to each community college, then splits the remaining portions into two parts. One part is determined by size and is linked to each college’s number of course credit hours. The other is linked to performance, aligning funding to the Vision Project, a strategic plan for improving student success in higher education.

“Places like Quinsigamond and Bristol have been growing like gangbusters, while there are other campuses — places like Cape Cod, Greenfield or Berkshire — that are not growing so fast or not at all,” Freeland said.

Quinsigamond is based in Worcester.

The governor’s proposed budget calls for $264 million in total funding for community colleges in fiscal 2015. For fiscal 2015, the Department of Higher Education has proposed rolling $20 million into base funding, then adding an additional $20 into performance-based funding. The fiscal 2015 budget process is still in its very early stages, and figures may change before a budget is passed.

Community colleges are awarded points based on size; graduation rates; the number of graduates in science, technology, engineering or math fields; graduating at-risk students and other metrics. The points determine how big a share of the funding pie each college receives.

As the formula is first implemented, no college will suffer funding cuts, Freeland said. Eventually, there will be a provision that won’t allow the state to cut a college’s funding by more than 5 percent in a given year, regardless of the scoring. Modifications may be made along the way.

The preliminary fiscal 2015 budget also includes a request for $15 million linked to the development of a new funding formula for the nine state universities in Massachusetts.

Bristol

“At Bristol Community College, we love the formula,” BCC President Jack Sbrega said. “Most of the years I’ve been here — and this is my 14th year — the appropriation was the same for all the community colleges, 3 percent up or 2 percent down. It made a bad situation worse. There were great inequities and, frankly, Bristol was suffering.”

As BCC, which is based in Fall River but has campuses throughout the county, grew from the eighth- to third-largest community college in the state, it saw its per-pupil funding decline under the old formula.

Since 2000, the college’s student population has grown by 80 percent. But until this past year, the dollars had not accompanied that growth.

“There was no doubt things had to be changed,” Sbrega said.

Sbrega said he and other community college presidents have had to argue for budget increases year over year. BCC was able to maintain educational programming for a growing number of students despite relatively stagnant state funding levels by making “prudent use of what we receive," he said.

"We run a very tight ship,” Sbrega said.

The college has added new buildings over time, including new academic spaces on Davol Street, in New Bedford and North Attleborough. Soon, the college will break ground on a new science and technology building on its main Elsbree Street campus.

Having an additional 20 percent funding in its coffers has enabled BCC to hire more full-time faculty, expand academic support services to students and provide more scholarships, Sbrega said.

“We were able to open a veterans center we didn’t have before," he said. "A student success center — these are all things we didn’t have before.”

Massachusetts Bay

“When you bring on a new funding model, what you don’t want to do is not allow for change and evolution,” Massachusetts Bay Community College President John O’Donnell said. “Because of the stop-loss model, every college actually gained funds. What this allows the colleges to do is adapt the concepts of access and success and make sure those are being focused on.”

Mass Bay, based in Framingham, saw a 16.3 percent increase in funding for fiscal 2014.

“Conceptually, I’m strongly in support of performance-based funding,” said O’Donnell, who helped develop a similar system in Ohio before coming to Mass Bay. “I have extensive experience under that model in other states.”

Cape Cod

Cape Cod Community College, based in West Barnstable, has a smaller enrollment than many other schools in the community college system and received a 3.5 percent funding increase in the current fiscal year.

“It’s a move in the right direction that there’s more funding being directed to community college students,” Cape Cod Community College President John Cox said. “We’re moving closer to the funding levels we had in the early 2000s. It takes pressure off having to raise fees, but we still have some distance to cover increasing funding to public higher education. I also think we’re on the leading edge of where funding for public higher education is heading.”

The formula also creates a dynamic in which schools are compared to one another.

“One of challenges we’ll have to adjust to is when we get to a year when funding is flat, when we basically take the same dollars and divide the pie up differently,” Cox said. “It could be you do well in a year when there is no additional funding, but you don’t get more dollars because another school did even better than you.”

North Shore

North Shore Community College President Pat Gentile, whose college got a 3.5 percent funding increase in fiscal 2014, said the formula is generally positive.

“I think holding the colleges accountable for how that money is used is reasonable,” Gentile said. “I think the way this performance funding formula is set, there’s a pie. As one does better, another one gets less. I believe the Legislature and the governor wanted to enhance and reward performance.”

Gentile said she feels North Shore, based in Danvers, is doing well in meeting most performance goals but is implementing new strategies to better track students.

“Our goal is to help every one of those students realize their education goal,” she said.

Massasoit

Massasoit Community College President Charles Wall said he generally supports the concept of performance funding but thinks there needs to be a high, permanent funding floor.

“It’s a first step, but it’s a work in progress,” Wall said. “We obviously always need to tweak it going forward.”

In fiscal 2014, Brockton-based Massasoit got a 3.5 percent increase, which includes funds for collective bargaining.

“About half of us are benefiting from this formula, and about half of us are not particularly benefiting from this unless there’s a hold-harmless provision,” Wall said. “After you’ve had decades of funding discrepancies, and you’ve had growth and change, the formula is going to have some unbalance in the beginning.”

Middlesex

Jay Linnehan, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Lowell-based Middlesex Community College, said the formula seems to be working well on the local level, from his perspective.

“This formula funding is a way better way to appropriate dollars than what the previous methodology was, which was incremental funding,” he said. “While any particular formula is going to have its glitches, we were pleased with the formula. It’s worked well for us.”

Middlesex got a 10.9 percent increase in fiscal 2014.

A statewide perspective

Springfield Technical Community College President Ira Rubenzahl, who chairs the Department of Higher Education’s statewide community colleges committee, said he’s happy to see attention paid to community colleges and hopes for more funding in the future. He called the funding formula “a good first step.”

“We’re the forgotten sector of education,” Rubenzahl said. “We’re underfunded. We have 100,000 students in 15 colleges, the most African-American and Latino students in any sector of higher education and the most poor students, but we’re the most underfunded. The people who need the most are getting the least.”

Herald News Staff Reporter Michael Gagne contributed to this story.

Gerry Tuoti is the Regional Newsbank Editor for GateHouse Media New England. Email him at gtuoti@tauntongazette.com or call him at 508-967-3137.